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On Sunday we escaped the intense rain that was falling over most of Switzerland. This time we tried a new national route, stage 2 of Alpenpanorama Trail, as it passes through the smallest canton of Switzerland, Appenzell. The name means “cell (state) of the abbot (of St. Gallen)” and religion had indeed a strong influence in its history: the canton is divided into two parts, the Protestant one and the Catholic one, and the capital.

What to say when you talk to yourself is the most effective book on personal growth that I’ve read in the last year.
The premise of the book is that our behavior, feelings, attitudes and beliefs are all a direct product of our mental programming. And our mind’s programs get recorded not based on whether they are true or false but simply by how many times and with how much attention we listen or “experience” the programming which, most of the time, happens as we talk to ourselves in our heads.

A group of investigative journalists at the Boston Globe uncovers a decades long cover-up of Catholic priests abusing children. Sadly the movie is based on a true story.The Spotlight team.
Why did the abuses happen?
According to a couple of studies, one of them by a psychotherapist who treated these priests for 20 years, the main causes were insufficient candidate screening and insufficient training to prepare for the challenges of celibacy.

What if an entity whose consciousness spans thousands of bodies suddenly gets restricted to a single body? And what if we lived in a world with only one gender?
Ancilliary Justice by Ann Leckie is a sci-fi story about spaceships, AIs, colonization and the moral struggle between doing what you know is right and face death or follow unjust orders. The story felt more like sitting on the Assembly of Ancient Greece than an adventure because of so much philosophical dialogue but I found the exercise of imagining myself owning multiple bodies very interesting.

Yesterday we almost hiked from Staffelegg to Hauenstein and we almost saw its five passes. Instead, due to an unjustifiably confidence in my prep skills combined with me field testing a new hiking app, we took the wrong turn after getting off the bus and went in the opposite direction.
I recently read about the power of visualizations so for this hike I prepared: I visualized where the sun would be during most of the hike, where we would begin and end.

What if an Irish girl emigrates to America, gets in love and has to come back Ireland?
This movie is set in the Ireland and New York of the 1960s and I found the story beautifully told. The main topic is immigration and what is “home” but it also touches on love, career and duty to your family. Given that I’m an immigrant myself I thought this could add another perspective to my experience.

If you would like to be free to work at any project you want regardless of the pay or be able to do things that are hard or impossible with most jobs (like going on a 3 months trip) before you become 60 or 65 I suggest taking a look at this story, for initial motivation (although there are more colorful ones on that blog), and then at the simple math behind how to do it which I summarize here:

What if a doctor who has been wrongly accused of killing his wife and sentenced to death escapes from prison?
What I liked the most of this movie are the main characters: Harrison Ford as Dr Richard Kimble and Tommy Lee Jones as Samuel Gerard, the US Marshal who is tracking him down. Richard is trying to figure out who killed his wife. He doesn’t care going being so close to the police and he cannot help but save lives when the opportunity arises.

Today’s adventure started in Einsiedeln, in the canton of Schwyz. This time we decided to one stage of the Via Jacobi which is part of “El Camino de Santiago”.
The first part of the hike ran through a wide valley outside of Einsiedeln. The weather looked challenging but the forecast promised no rain over the following hours and we are trusting people.
View right outside of Eisiedeln. We saw various small Christian chapels and altars along the way as well as a fancy-looking convent for Benedictine nuns.